Computers and Society
Intellectual Property
Chris Brooks
Department of Computer Science
University of San Francisco
Intellectual Property
Refers to the rights you possess regarding your ideas or
creative work.
Can subdivide into three areas:
Creative works (copyright)
Inventions (patent)
Identity (trademark)
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Copyright
Meant to protect individual works from being copied
Applies to:
Written works (Books, articles, web pages ,etc)
Visual works (Movies, television, art, photographs,
etc)
Audio works (music, performances, etc)
Software
Copyright is intended to allow a creator to profit from
his/her creative works.
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Copyright
Underlying ideas are not protected; only their specific
manifestation.
For example, if someone reverse-engineered your
encryption tool and released their own, which functioned
equivalently, this is not a copyright violation. (might be a
patent violation.)
A Copyright gives an author exclusive rights to their
works for a “limited time.” (U.S. Constitution, Article 1,
Sec 8)
Protects original work, but not derived ideas or facts, or
pre-existing incorporated material.
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Copyright
What “limited time” means has been a legal debate
Originally 28 years, then 56, then life plus 50 years.
Currently life + 70, or 95 years for corporate
authorship
Standard for originality is very low.
Must embody “a minimum level of creativity”
Must owe its origin to the author claiming copyright.
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Copyright
In the U.S., a work is copyrighted as soon as it is
created.
No special application needed.
Applications can be obtained from U.S. Copyright office
Registering your copyright may help you get damages
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Copyright and Software
Reverse Engineering
Not always clear-cut
Some courts have ruled that decompilation to an
intermediate form, which is then copied, is a
copyright infringement.
Reverse engineering to a wholly different form is
usually considered fair use.
Often, software licenses will expressly forbid reverse
engineering.
DMCA forbids circumventing copy-protection
measures
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Copyright and Software
“Look and Feel”
Some manufacturers have tried to sue competitors for
copying the “expression of their ideas.”
1988: Apple sues Microsoft and HP for copyright
infringement
Courts found that if there’s only one way to express
an idea, that expression cannot be copyrighted.
Apple lost the suit, not because of the validity of
copyrighting look and feel, but because it was ruled
that there was no other way to implement overlapping
windows.
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Copyright and Software
1995: Lotus sued Borland
Lotus had already sued two small companies for
producing Lotus 1-2-3 clones.
claim: Borland Quattro had a “Lotus 1-2-3 emulation
mode”
Lotus won at the trial court level, but lost in appeals.
Issue is still unsettled.
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Public Domain
Non-copyrighted works are said to be in the “public
domain”
A work in the public domain can be freely used by
anyone.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Bible
The U.S. Constitution
Bach, Beethoven, etc.
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Public Domain
Once copyright expires, works enter the public domain
U.S. Government works cannot be copyrighted.
Forfeiture
Previously, if authors did not defend their works
against infringement, copyright was considered
forfeited.
Since 1988, this is no longer the case.
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Patent
Patents are designed to protect the ideas behind an
invention.
Owner has an exclusive monopoly for 20 years.
A patent protects the idea itself, rather than the
expresion of an idea.
Owner must specifically file for a patent.
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Patent
Four types of inventions can be patented
Machines, man-made products, compositions of
matter, processing methods.
Cannot be patented:
Laws of nature, natural phenomena, abstract ideas.
Gray area: algorithms can be patented if instantiated in
a machine or process with a “useful” result.
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Patent
To be patented, an invention must be new, original,
novel, and nonobvious.
Extended to manufactured goods, plants, medical
procedures, and software.
Goals: Reward innovation, encourage competitors to
reproduce functionality in a new form.
Dangers: Stfile competition by presenting a barrier to
entry.
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E-commerce Patents
Most early CS and networking innovations were not
patented by their inventors.
e.g. TCP/IP, Ethernet, mouse
1998: Federal Appeals court rules that “business
methods” can be patented.
Signature Financial patented a ’hub and spoke’
system for consolidating portfolios.
Court ruled that a “business process” was no
different from a manufacturing process.
Led to a huge spike in the number of patent
applications in e-commerce.
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E-commerce Patents
Some e-commerce patents
Amazon: One-click purchasing
CyberGold: Attention brokerage (paying people to
view ads)
Open Market: Electronic Shopping Carts
Priceline: “name your own price” sales
Akamai: Internet Content Delivery via Global Hoting
System
NetZero: Display of third-party ads in floating
windows
British Telecom: Hyperlinks
DoubleClick: Dynamic display of ads
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Patent Criticisms
Some observers worry that the Patent Office is not
discerning enough.
May be unable to adequately take into account
technological issues.
May make patent claims in the hope of collecting (or
suing for) licensing fees.
Many patent claims are very broad. (hyperlinks)
Many ideas are either ’obvious’ or an extension of a
historical practice. (shopping carts)
In Europe, business methods are not patentable unless
implemented through a particular technology.
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Trademark
A Trademark is a mark used to identify goods and their
source.
Brand name, mascot, slogan, etc.
Cannot be trademarked: Flags of nations, common
descriptive words (’green’), deceptive marks, previous
trademarks.
Last for 10 years, and can be renewed indefinitely.
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Trademark and the Internet
Trademark-related lawsuits typically claim that a mark is
being diluted (the association between mark and seller
is being weakened) or that market confusion
(Consumers are being misled).
Example: Registering a domain name corresponding to
a trademark for your own business.
www.fordrecalls.com used to point to an “adult”
website
Court ruled that this diluted Ford’s trademark.
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Trademark Infringement
Like copyright, trademark rights do not extend to:
Parody
Non-commercial use
Product evaluation/new reporting
Fair Use (either the term is in common use, or the
user must be using it to refer to his/her own product
in an unambiguous way)
Georgaphic limitations
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Trademark and the Internet
Cybersquatting
Buying a domain name to sell it to the trademark
holder.
Metatagging
Including trademarked terms in META tags to
improve search engine ranking.
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Methods for Protecting and Distributi
Once you’ve made an intellectual property, such as a
program, you need to decide what to do with it.
You need to decide the terms under which people can
use your software.
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Licensing
A license specifies the terms under which a piece of
software can be used. It can grant all of the terms that
copyright does, or just a subset.
It may specify:
rules about copying
use for profit
number of installations
ownership (do you own the software, or just use it?)
Responsibility for usage
technical support
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Commercial Licenses
These are the traditional licenses that come with most
shrink-wrapped software.
Legal contract: as copyright holder, the authors can
choose whatever usage terms they like.
They typically prohibit users from tampering with,
modifying or redistributing the software.
Often, ownership remains with the vendor; users are
techinally leasing the code.
Typically limits liability; vendor is not responsible for
damage.
May also restrict usage, duration, number of machines,
reverse engineering.
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Public Domain
The simplest way to freely distribute your program is to
put it into the public domain.
No copyright is retained; users can do whatever they
want with your program.
This includes selling it or converting it into a proprietary
product and copyrighting the derivative work.
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Copyleft
Copyleft is more restrictive than putting something in the
public domain.
Copyleft is an idea promoted by the GNU foundation
Copyleft requires that anyone who redistributes
software, either original or changed, must release this
software under copyleft.
Note that you can charge for this new software, but you
can’t change the licensing terms.
This provides developers with an incentive to develop
free software
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Copyleft
Stallman: “If you will make your software free, you can
use this code.”
Example: The C++ front-end to gcc was developed in
industry. GNU’s copyleft required it to be copylefted,
since it used copylefted code.
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Examples of Copylefted Software
Emacs
gcc
Many unix tools
Anything released under the GNU Public license
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GNU Public License
The GNU Public license is the most well-known
implementation of the “Free Software” principles.
Distribution terms: everyone has the right to use, modify
and redistribute copylefted code as long as the rights to
this code or any derived code are not changed.
In other words, you can’t weaken the use conditions (or
strengthen restrictions) on copylefted code.
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Free Software
It’s useful to think a bit about what “free software” really
means.
“Free as in speech, not as in beer.”
In other words, you have the right to do what you want
with it, not that you’re obligated to get it without paying.
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Free Software
GNU software freedoms:
The freedom to run the program for any purpose
The freedom to study the program and how it works
(i.e. source code access)
The freedom to redistribute copies
The freedom to modify the program and redistribute
the modified version
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The Free Software Foundation
Started by Richard Stallman in 1985 as a response to
the overwhelmingly proprietary nature of software at the
time.
No free OSes (Unix was very expensive), few free
tools.
Goal: develop a free OS, along with a set of tools for
that OS (editor, compiler, mail reader, etc)
This system was referred to as GNU (Gnu’s not Unix)
When the linux kernel was developed in the early 1990s,
GNU finally had a free OS to run on.
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Lesser GPL
GNU/FSF also offers something called the “Lesser GPL”
Allows GPL’ed libraries to be linked into non-free code,
which can then be proprietary.
Goal: encourage adoption of a particular standard
Or, the free library may do the same job as a
widely-existing non-free library.
For example, the GNU C library.
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Open Source
Open Source is a broader term that covers a number of
different possible licensing agreements.
Basic criteria:
License must not prevent redistribution, and must
allow free distribution.
Source code for the program must be publically
available.
Derived works must be covered under the original
license.
License may require modifications to be distributed
as separate patches, or be clearly named or
identified.
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Open Source
License may not discriminate against groups of users.
For example, countries may have export restrictions.
An open source license may remind users to obey
the law, but cannot explicitly incorporate these
restrictions.
Also cannot restrict use to, for example, only
non-commercial entities
Cannot require that it be distributed only with other
open-source works.
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Examples of Open Source software
Mozilla
Apache
Perl, Python, all GNU tools
PHP
openSSH
Much more ...
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Economics of Open Source
A common objection to open source is: “But I need to
eat!”
If your program is freely available, how can you make
money from it?
Maintenance/development: Most programmers spend a
large fraction of their time maintaining tools or modifying
them for a particular business. this won’t change if the
underlying codebase is open source.
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Economics of Open Source
Support/consultation. Just because something is free
doesn’t mean there’s no value for people who are
experts at using it.
Paid development. If a tool is widely accepted or
deemed valuable, industry will subsidize its
development, even if the end product is open source,
because it’s valuable to them.
e.g. Apache, g++, perl, ANTLR
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Open Source as a Business Model
Some managers may also be reluctant to adopt an
open-source model.
“Why should we give away something that cost us
lots of money to develop?”
Reliability: open source is arguably more reliable, as
more people are using and testing the code.
Technical superiority: this is an open argument, but
OS proponents argue that having more developers
leads to a better product.
Rapid response. Faster turnaround times allow
businesses to respond to customer needs more
easily.
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Open Source as a Business Model
Market penetration. OS may allow a firm to add
developments that would not be feasible otherwise. For
example, ports to less popular operating systems.
Remember, software has a “network effect” - getting a
large user base makes it more valuable.
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Open Source as a Business Model
Potential Open-source business models:
Support sellers (RedHat): Give away the product, sell
support, after-sale service.
Multiple levels: (MySQL) - Open-source community
version, and a ’for-pay’ enterprise version.
Loss-leader. (Netscape, Java): You give away your
software to help sales of related, closed software.
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Open Source as a Business Model
Product improvement. (SGI) A hardware company
supports and ships open-source software (such as
Samba) that improves their other products.
Accessorizing. (O’Reilly, VA research) Selling systems
or manuals that use or describe open-source systems.
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Creative Commons
These are just a few of the potential ways in which you
may want to control the use of your IP.
Creative Commons is an organization started by IP and
CS experts devoted to increasing people’s ability to
control access to their work.
Provides a broad set of potential licenses for creators of
IP.
Goals: Increase amount and accessibility of online
source material.
Also provides a standard metadata encoding for these
licenses using HTML and RDF.
This makes the licenses standardized and
machine-readable.
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Creative Commons
Some CC licenses:
Attribution: Anyone can use your work, but they must
give you credit.
Noncommercial. People can use and display your work
for noncommercial purposes.
No derivative works. People can use or copy your work,
but not modify it.
Share alike. People can distribute derivative works as
long as original licensing terms remain.
Full copyright. You retain all rights to how your work is
used.
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